Are you an Ultimate Sales Leader yet?

As a sales manager, you have a big impact on the success of each member of your team, and your team knows it.

Research has shown that 69% of salespeople who exceed quota rate their sales manager as ‘excellent’ or ‘above average’. While it’s great to be recognized, ultimate sales leaders don’t do it for the glory, they live to inspire their team to achieve greatness and know how to push all the right buttons to help them succeed.

While most good sales leaders have high-achieving teams, they have a lot more in common. Here are some of the sales leader traits that make the difference between being good and being an ultimate sales leader.

Lead for the long-term

No sales team is successful based on one deal. A good sales team requires a long-term and strategic approach and it’s up to their sales leader to provide the big picture. Great sales leaders develop a sales playbook with vision and makes sure there team follows it to achieve their end goal. The playbook looks at every aspect of the sales process, from prospecting to closing and communicates a clear plan on how they will achieve it.

While any manager can write a playbook, what separates great leaders is their ability to set the vision, communicate it and follow through. They don’t chop and change their mind or confuse their team. They communicate the plan clearly and make sure everyone understands what it means for them and for their customers. They also define clear development plans for their people and deliver on them.

After all, sales are only successful if the customer wins, and ultimate sales leaders know this and make sure the customer is front and center of their vision.

Be motivated by the end goal

Sales is a numbers game and the best sales leaders never allow their team to take their eye off the prize – achieving target. To achieve the sales leader may have to put themselves in a position where they absorb any noise, distractions, and negativity that may bring their team down. They’re good listeners and know how to remove roadblocks or just lend an ear when a salesperson needs to vent.

What sets an ultimate sales leader apart is their ability to know when to step in and fix something, and when to let it go. This requires good judgment and an understanding of what things can actually make a difference to sales results, and what are just irritations that are having minimal impact.

Hire the right people

Nothing wastes more time than hiring the wrong salesperson.That’s why good sales leaders take the time to recruit the right people and onboard them properly. There’s no time for bad recruits or sales reps that are struggling to ramp up in a high-achieving sales organization.

Hiring the right people is a skill. You can’t just look at someone’s CV and know they’re perfect for the job. It takes good judgment and instinct to know whether someone has the skill to build strong relationships and help customers find the right solution. Great sales leaders know how to spot someone who can close a deal or know when to fold and move on to better opportunities.

They can also identify potential where others may not notice. This means they don’t spend countless hours, weeks and months trying to get a salesperson to quota when they just don’t have the capability to make it. They can then devote their energies to other tasks that will make a difference when it comes to helping their salespeople achieve success.

Coach with passion

Salespeople are hungry to sell and have a thirst for anything that will help them do it better.  Ultimate sales leaders not only know this, but they know how to tap into this desire and help their salespeople channel it. One of the best ways to improve how reps sell is to take them on a journey of discovery and learning about their profession through mentoring and coaching. In fact, dynamic coaching can improve win rates by up to 27.6%.

Structured coaching helps salespeople improve how they approach customers, manage their sales funnel and close deals. But to really make a difference, sales leaders need to customize their coaching programs to meet the individual needs of each sales rep. After all, different reps need different types of coaching. An astute sales leader will determine the best approach for the individual and adapt their coaching plan for it, whether it’s going out to sales calls with them or scenario-based coaching.

Ultimate sales leaders know that coaching is good for their team, but they also are passionate about it. They embrace the opportunity to tap into the needs of each rep and build a cadence for sales coaching. This allows ultimate sales leaders to build momentum and ensure their sales team grows and prospers.

Empower everyone through accountability

75% of high-performing sales managers hold their salespeople accountable for their quota, compared to 58% of underperforming managers. But it takes a lot more than tracking your sales reps quotas to make them accountable.

Great sales leaders strive to achieve consistency in all aspects of the sales team, from following process to the message that customers hear. They do this by empowering their team through data and process.

Research shows that 43% of high-performing sales managers have a sales process that’s closely monitored, strictly enforced, or automated, compared to 29% of underperforming sales managers.

The key to keeping a sales team accountable is in the data. They set transparent performance criteria and use this to monitor and assess their team. There are no surprises, but there’s also no room for ambiguity.

Ultimate sales leaders don’t focus on lagging reports, they’re driven by data that shows them what their reps are doing today and how they can improve tomorrow. This information can then be used to both improve and inspire reps by identifying knowledge and skill gaps before they become problems and rewarding achievements straight away.

Empowering and rewarding reps is important for accountability. It keeps high performers accountable for their achievements, gives them control over their own development, and puts a fire in the belly of the laggards who also want their peers to see their name in lights.

Listen and communicate with care

Last but certainly not least, a true leader cares about the welfare of their charges. They don’t want to take the glory for themselves, they want each individual to learn, improve and for them to succeed together. By demonstrating that they care about their team, ultimate sales leaders gain the respect and trust of their reps. This helps them open up and be honest about their concerns and fears. With this knowledge, sales leaders can then help their reps become even better at selling.

The reality is that ultimate sales leaders don’t spend their time sitting behind a desk and watching the sales come in. They’re part of the team and in the trenches with their salespeople. Whenever a shot is fired they’re there – leading the way and giving them the support they need to win each and every battle.

It’s the Year of the Coach

Coaching is at the top of everyone’s minds at the moment – for good reason. A good coach can help more salespeople achieve quota by up to 10% and when you combine training and coaching, sales productivity also increases.

With these results, it’s no surprise that everyone is jumping on the coaching bandwagon, but not all coaching impactful.
According to the International Coaching Federation, coaching is:

“An interactive process to help individuals and organizations develop more rapidly and produce more satisfying results; improving other’s ability to set goals, take action, make better decisions and make full use of their natural strengths.”

Impactful coaching focuses on the needs of your reps and helps them improve how they approach different parts of the sales process or their customers. The results from impactful coaching go straight to your topline revenue.

Managers that are not impactful fail to move the needle on reps’ behavior and/or their performance. They just don’t have the skills required of a coach – perhaps they’re doing less coaching and more telling or controlling. Reps’ learn little from being told what they’re doing wrong, impactful coaching is a collaborative way to help them learn how to improve how they sell. Sometimes coaching is ineffective because managers just aren’t doing it properly — perhaps they’re just ticking a box or scoring their team more favorably in coaching exercises due to bias or even apathy.

It is possible to turn ineffective coaches into impactful ones, but in order to do that, you need to identify who is actually ineffective. Every sales manager is different, and short of watching every coaching session, it can be difficult to objectively know whether they’re making a difference to their reps’ performance. To do this you require data – but not just any data – the right data.

Identifying whether sales coaches are ineffective or impactful

The Sales Capability Index™ (SCI) is an index that has been developed by Mindtickle, which provides a capabilities score that, for the first time in the industry, provides a holistic, quantified assessment of sales rep and team readiness while also producing a leading indicator of their expected performance.

Essentially, the SCI provides a holistic, quantified assessment of individual sales reps and a manager’s entire team’s sales readiness. This is then linked to their performance, producing a leading indicator of their expected performance.Sales_capability_index

The SCI combines not only coaching but also knowledge and skill, so you can see what’s really impacting performance and what’s not. For example, if you’ve just launched a new product, coaching program, competitor series or other sales enablement initiatives to your sales team, you can see what elements have had an impact and by looking at scores before and after.

The score gives you a high level of conviction about how prepared your sales teams are and identify what initiatives are making an impact and what aren’t. It will also give you an indication of whether coaching (or other initiatives) are likely to impact your sales results so you can predict revenue more accurately.

As the data can be broken down by individual and by team, you can also see whether individual sales managers are coaching effectively – are they making a difference to the sales outcomes or not. This brings issues with sales manager’s coaching abilities to the surface, so they can be addressed long before the quarter or year is lost.

Coaching is only effective if it drives a business outcome. There is no point having your management team spend hours each week coaching reps if your top line revenue doesn’t grow. By using this data, coaching can be directly linked to real outcomes.

The same data can be used for most sales enablement initiatives. So if you launch a new product you can also look at the curriculum that was delivered to reps and assess whether it’s helped them sell or not. This helps you measure your enablement initiatives and identify where they need to be adjusted to make a real impact on your sales teams.

Coaching needs to have specific criteria for maximum effectiveness

In order to be effective, sales managers also need to know what to coach. No rep needs to be developed in every aspect of the sales process, but trying to find what they need help with isn’t always clear-cut.

By breaking down down the entire sales process and connecting each step with the enablement data that you have, you can look at sales competencies across each stage. This shows you exactly where a rep or a sales manager may need help.

The chart below gives you an example that shows you a rep that is able to explore opportunities and manage objections well, but perhaps needs help upselling and in call scheduling. The data pinpoints exactly where opportunities fail and evaluates qualitatively and quantitatively what competencies are needed at that specific stage.
Sales capability index™

This level of granularity allows managers to do tactical coaching and allows you to identify whether sales managers have skewed competencies. It gets to the heart of the issue and allows you to hone in on what needs to be done.

When looking at your sales team as a whole, it means you can identify if there is consistency across how teams are coached or if managers are perhaps playing to their strengths to the detriment of their team’s performance.

This kind of data has the potential to be a game changer. It can help identify bias in coaching performance and gives you the opportunity to address it objectively.

Empowering end users

A final way to improve impactful coaching across your sales teams is to give users the ability to approve or disapprove coaching feedback. Rather than just letting the sales managers have a say about how a coaching session went, let the reps tell you if they felt the session made a difference to them. This data can also be telling, because if your reps don’t feel like they’re benefitting from their coaching sessions, then it may be symptomatic of a broader problem – either with your coaching program or with individual coaches.

We all have so many tools in our sales stack, each providing an array of data. While it’s nice to have these numbers at our fingertips, they’re irrelevant if they can’t tell you how to improve your sales outcomes. After all, who has time to look through every data point available to them and work out what they’re saying.

For the Year of the Coach to make a real difference to your sales outcomes, you need to ensure that you have access to data that clearly and succinctly helps you link your coaching plans to your sales outcomes like the SCI does.

Drive Behavioral Change Through a Sales Readiness Culture

One of the main goals of training and coaching is behavioral change. So often these activities, alone, don’t produce the desired improvements. Research by Hermann Ebbinghaus shows that training without reinforcement results in 80-90% of information being forgotten within just one month. A systemic approach to

continuous

coaching and training is necessary to really prepare your salesforce to be “ready” to effectively engage customers and keep them prepared. A culture of sales readiness will do the job. Let’s look at how developing this type of work environment will result in the behavior changes and outcomes you’re seeking.
Continuous learning:

According to Ebbinghaus, the information presented

over spaced intervals is learned and retained more easily and more effectively.

So, learning in bite-sized, frequent increments, also known as micro-learning, fits into sales rep schedules in their usual work environment. This allows them to remain productive as they learn. It also reduces the number of group trainings, or may completely eliminate them, while improving knowledge retention.
Repetitive practice:

Practicing new knowledge application or techniques through role playing is preferable to experimenting with sales pitches or presentation with actual prospects. Your team will be more prepared, confident, and effective in the field as a result.
Feedback:

Timely feedback on role play and practice reinforce desired behaviors while preventing the formation of bad habits. This sales coaching and guidance is critical to driving results. According to the 2017 CSO Insights Sales Enablement Optimization Report, formal and dynamic coaching delivers the most significant performance impacts.
Easily applied:

When contextual training is used, your reps don’t have to translate what they learn to effectively apply it in real-life situations. This allows them to easily build on what they know and continually improve.
Accessible anywhere:

Making the elements of sales readiness accessible from anywhere allows team members to learn and participate at their desks or on the go. This improves compliance and results because it makes it easy to complete desired activities without changing their schedules.
Measurement:

The only way to really know if your sales reps are progressing toward the desired level or type of performance is to measure it. Sales readiness includes documentation throughout the process and awards certification when the specified behavior is demonstrated. This may be used to qualify reps to promote new products, ensuring they have the proper knowledge and presentation techniques before doing so.
Best practices:

According to CSO Insights, the sharing of best practices across the sales team is a characteristic of a formal coaching process. This was once accomplished by reps riding along, or listening in on calls, with a more experienced one. A far more efficient method is to maintain recordings or videos of desired behaviors. These are then used as examples for those learning them and helps the student to recognize what success looks or sounds like.
Up-to-date information:

The sharing of internal communications are the final aspect of the sales readiness culture. They’re critical to keeping reps current on product, market, and company changes so they are always prepared to speak intelligently with customers.

All these elements combined create a culture of sales readiness. They’ve been proven to produce the desired behavioral changes on an ongoing basis. Give it a try for continuous performance improvements and successfully attained goals. To learn how Mindtickle can help, check out the value our customers are gaining by reading our

customer stories

.

Sales Managers’ Guide to Bridging the Training Gap between Mavens and Rookies

training mavens and rookies 2As a sales manager, one of your many challenges is continuously developing different sales reps. The needs of reps who are relatively new to the job are very different to that of seasoned reps, as is their attitude to development. While your newbies may be thirsty for knowledge and ideas, it can be harder to bring a veteran salesperson along on the ride with you. And while an experienced rep may hit the ground running, but they may not be able to sustain improvement in their sales results over time unless they overcome their reluctance to change.

In the past, it may have been alright to leave veterans to their own devices, but now the velocity of change in products, consumer buying behaviors and industry dynamics are just too quick to leave development in reps’ own hands. Your rookies and mavens must both be constantly on the ball. To achieve this they must be open to learning, developing and changing their behavior. There are several things that you can do to help bridge the training gap between your mavens and rookies.

Understand who you’re working with

Before you can determine how to approach your reps, it’s essential to understand where they are on the development curve. While years of experience may be an indicator of expertize, it isn’t necessarily the best one.

The best way to tell a pro salesperson from a novice is through observation. Experienced reps know how to get under the skin of a customer’s problem and present them with solutions that best address their needs. They can create a strategy even for the most complex of sales processes, that will see them through preparing for customer meetings to the demonstration of closing the sale. At each stage in the process, a seasoned rep will know how to adjust their game plan, question the customer in more depth, envisage the result and nurture the opportunity to completion. This takes vision, preparation, and skill.

In comparison, a rookie may be uncertain or less organized in their approach. Their lack of experience may see them missing crucial opportunities to uncover customer pain points or suggest appropriate solutions. While newbies may be good at following a sales process, that doesn’t mean they can see the end point and adjust to new circumstances as they arise. Following a process is simple, preparing and reacting to the unknown takes experience.

As you observe your reps, note areas where they have skill gaps that require development. This will then form part of their development plan.

Tailor development plans to meet the needs of your reps

Once you know who you’re dealing with you can start putting together a development plan for them. The key to helping both mavens and rookies get to where you need them to be is to tailor development to meet their needs.

While your standard onboarding process may go through the basics of selling, this may bore and potentially make your seasoned reps tune out. As soon as someone tunes out of your training program it’s very hard to regain their attention, even if something is relevant to them later down the track. That’s why it’s important to tailor development and training from the get-go, starting with your onboarding program.

Newbies will need to cover everything, from your sales process to who everyone in the sales process is. But your new seasoned reps may already know the basics of selling so focus on showing them your points of difference. Highlight the aspects of your sales process that are unique to your business, provide them with training on how to use the tools in your stack that they’ve never seen before and of course focus in on the nitty-gritty of your product. Even if they’ve worked in the industry before, your product is unique and every new sales rep will need to learn the finer points of your solution to sell effectively.

A good place to start developing an ongoing individual training and coaching plan is the skill gaps you identified when you observed your reps in practice. Regardless of whether your reps are new to sales or have been selling for decades, it’s best to customize training to meet their individual needs. If your newbies need more help articulating your value proposition then focus on role plays to coach them. Whereas your seasoned reps may need more help moving prospects through the sales pipeline, so focus in on techniques like gathering case studies and success stories to help them get prospects closer to closing.

A common technique to support new hires is to provide them with a mentor. While this may be a great idea for a rookie, because they can learn from a more experienced rep, a maven may find it a tad condescending. Rather than giving them a mentor, offer your seasoned reps the opportunity to meet with the A players on your team and hear their thoughts on the business. They can then connect with peers on the same level.

Show benefits and gain buy-in

Any adult who is being trained needs to understand what’s in it for them before they will embrace change. Relatively new sales reps may be a little more open to training because they understand how they will benefit  – if they’ve never done something before they know they have a lot to learn. But it’s important to still show them the benefits of what they’re learning.

For seasoned reps, it’s no different, they need to know what the benefits to them will be, and this may be harder to show them. But if you want them to accept your coaching then they need to understand how coaching them on using competitive insights will help them reach their quota.

One way to help someone overcome resistance to training is to understand why they’re reluctant to learn – perhaps they’ve done training sessions before and it didn’t help them. If that’s the case then you may need to understand what their past experiences were and how your proposed development plan is different.

Another way to bring people on board with your training program is to get their buy-in. This can be used for both rookies and mavens. Ask them what areas they would like to develop and how they believe it will benefit them. The training then becomes their idea, not yours, and will help them commit to it.

Make them accountable

There’s no point training anyone if you don’t clear expectations and defined goals. Everyone involved in the training should be held accountable for the outcomes, not just the reps. This creates a team environment – you’re all in it together – and makes it easier to have enforceable consequences if someone starts slipping into old habits. This approach works for everyone, seasoned reps, and newbies because everyone needs to know what they’re shooting for.

Where it may differ between the two groups of reps is in terms of how you monitor and enforce behaviors. Micro-managing isn’t all that effective for anyone, but a new rep may be more open to hand-holding through the training process than a pro rep. If they’ve never sold before then they may find it useful for you to break down their goals further – rather than just showing them their monthly quota show them what that means in terms of the number of calls, meetings, and demos.

It may be a lot more difficult to get your more experienced reps to put their new skills into practice. Even if you’ve shown them the benefits and gained their buy-in they may need more coaxing to truly see the value in the skills. If talking them through it doesn’t work, try showing them the value by giving them hard facts. Measure the difference in their performance before and after they use the skills to demonstrate how it will impact their performance. This will not only demonstrate the value of the learning but may also encourage them to adopt the new skills faster.

If this still doesn’t work, make them accountable by putting in place hard consequences if they don’t put their new skills into practice. This shows them that you’re serious about behavioral change and lets them choose between playing ball or facing the music. It will soon become clear whether they’re committed to their own development or want to stay stuck in the past.

The reality is that no two sales reps are the same, so it makes sense to tailor training programs to meet their needs. Thanks to new sales readiness tools, it’s easier to create customized training paths and help reps, regardless of their experience levels, to learn new tricks.

[Podcast] How Focus can Increase Your Sales Team Performance – Episode 26


In this 25 minute podcast Steve explains:

  • What makes a great sales team
  • How sales enablement needs differ within sales teams and how technology can help address this
  • How Kaizen can be applied to sales teams to improve their productivity

“Whatever type of sales team you have, the larger it gets the more important the sales enablement and sales operations role becomes. If you have 100 guys, and you save them all 5% of their time, that’s hiring five guys for free,” exclaims Steve Benson.
Steve began his career in software sales and has worked for IBM, HP, and Google. Now as CEO of Badger, he helps field salespeople focus on their best customers and optimize revenue opportunities by mapping out their territories.
The key to optimizing your sales team is a focus. “You have to study your sales team almost like an anthropologist or a sociologist would and use those stats. What people often find is that there’s a lot of value in a lack of focus on field sales teams. People are spending their time on the wrong leads. They’re not focusing on the highest probability deals to close, and making sure that they make it over the line. It’s the same for inside sales team, helping them focus on the right groups, with the right message, at the right time is really important,” explains Steve.
While the focus is important, it’s also essential that sales enablement, operations, marketing and other members of the team understand what each sales reps need when looking at ways to leverage technology.
“What the outside guys need is different to what the inside guys need. What the people who are selling to giant companies need is different than the people that are selling over the phones to small companies. There’s a variety of ways you can split up your sales team and different strategies to do that, but then I think it’s really important that one size does not fit all from your sales tech sack.”

Is Your Sales Team Over-Managed and Under-led?

5-proven-ways-to-increase-adoption-of-your-sales-enablement-initiatives-500x-500It’s a common misconception that management and leadership are the same things but they’re not. Managing involves dealing with or controlling things – for a sales manager this could be anything from fighting fires to telling reps what they should be doing.

Whereas leadership is about leading people and guiding them to achieve. Both require different skill sets and have vastly different results when it comes to teams. According to author Tom Peters:

 

“Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.”

While sales managers need both management and leadership skills, many tend to manage more than they lead. After all, it’s easy to monitor and react to statistics, processes, and deadlines. But it’s much more challenging to inspire and develop a team to achieve by developing and executing a clear strategy. When a sales team is over-managed and under-led it can lead to several problems that may impact your sales results, team turnover and the overall culture of your sales organization.

Managing is not motivating

One of the biggest issues with managing people rather than leading them is that it can be demotivating. Very few people are inspired to succeed when they’re told that they’re not meeting quota.  By focusing in on the numbers or process constantly, sales managers risk alienating and demotivating the majority of their team and make them feel unappreciated.

According to CSO Insights

20% of salespeople turnover each year

– that’s a significant investment walking out the door. They also found that sales managers only spend about 20% of their time actually helping sales reps sell, something that’s unlikely to be a coincidence. Reps that feel supported are more likely to feel motivated and willing to stay. In fact,

87% of millennials and 69% of other employees

say that development opportunities are important to them in a role. That’s one area where leadership is particularly important.

Directing traffic serves a purpose but it’s far more exciting to take your team on a journey to get them to where they need to be. Rather than focusing in on what someone is doing, strong leadership can help guide salespeople on how they can improve and set a clear path to help them achieve it. This is particularly important in this day and age where buyers are well-informed and savvy. They require salespeople who are well-informed and adaptable, and reps need strong leadership to learn these skills.

Leadership is liberating

Sales teams that are truly led are liberated and unconstrained. They’re given wings to do their job well, rather than being bogged down in red tape and control. This doesn’t mean that leadership equates to anarchy, far from it. But a good leader knows how to influence behavior. They will help their team find a way through the necessary elements of their role so that they can focus on what’s really important – selling better and closing deals.

The numbers are of course important, but a good leader knows which numbers to focus on and how to use them to influence their team. That final step is what makes the difference between a manager and a leader. Numbers and processes are good, but ultimately they are just a tool to inform decisions. If you want a salesperson to perform their best, then you need to look at all the aspects of their role. The numbers can inform this, but they will rarely tell the whole story.

Bain & Co has conducted detailed research

over several years about what makes a leader. Their research has identified leadership attributes that focus in on the human aspects of performance and grouped them into four key areas:
over-managed under-led

Leadership is less about monitoring and more about creating an environment where people can thrive. This involves building trust, encouraging people to learn and inspiring them to achieve. It’s about building a sales culture that reaps dividends long into the future.

How to shift the balance from managing to leading

There are several things that you can do to focus on leading over managing. One of the most important is to set a strategy and be clear about its goals. It should set the stage for what they need to achieve and how they will go about doing this. This can then be constantly reiterated through communications, coaching sessions, rewards and KPIs. This gives them clarity and also creates a cadence for them to look forward, develop and strive for their goals.

By linking your team’s development, through training and coaching, they not only see that you’re investing in them but that there is a purpose to what they’re being asked to do. It is here where you can rely on management tools – track leading indicators to identify where to focus your energy. Use all the data available to identify the key areas of focus and inform coaching and training programs. While your reps don’t need to know the detail of the analysis, they should be able to see how the areas of focus link to the overall strategy.

Another important aspect of a sales manager’s role is to make it easier for their team to sell. Many sales roles inevitably come with a lot of non-selling tasks and there’s always room for improvement. This often provides a good opportunity for leaders to seek out feedback and suggestions from their team. By giving their team a forum to have their say, the can feel some ownership over the issues and feel like they are proactively involved in trying to address them.

The role of a sales manager certainly isn’t easy, but it can be far more effective by making a conscious effort to balance the need to manage with the importance of leading.

7 Things that will Transform Sales Readiness in 2018

7-things-that-will-transform-sales-readiness-in-2018-(Conflicted-copy-from-shrawan’s-MacBook-Pro-on-2017-12-28)The end of the year is fast approaching and 2018 is already promising to be another huge year for sales readiness. As the pace of sales accelerates, buyers become even more knowledgeable and industry dynamics continue to evolve rapidly, so there’s no time for sales organizations to slow down. Here’s our forecast of what’s in store for sales readiness in 2018.

1. Sales readiness becomes essential

Just a few years ago Sales Ops was considered a nice-to-have, now it’s an integral part of a robust sales organization. Sales readiness is coming of age and the best sales teams understand how important it is to gain a competitive advantage. In 2018, sales readiness will no longer be viewed as an option and more businesses will see it as an essential element of a winning sales strategy.

2. Artificial intelligence will arrive but not as expected

There has been a lot of hype about artificial intelligence (AI) in recent years but it’s still a long way from replacing sales reps. In 2018, AI will start to make a difference in the sales process – it will help reps work smarter and faster, not replace them. There are so many manual tasks that that can be achieved quickly with the assistance of AI according to

Mohit Garg, Co-Founder and Go-To-Market leader

of Mindtickle “

Processes that can easily be automated, eliminating repetitive work, maximizing sales outcomes by taking advantage of data-driven insights, so that the sales reps can focus on closing deals.”

Another area where AI is showing huge promise that will prove its value in the coming year is in the area of dynamic coaching. AI will be able to identify triggers and provide coaching opportunities to managers so they can help reps deal with specific situations in real time.

Tamara Schenk, Research Director of CSO Insights

notes “

Sales leaders will shift their enablement investments between individual contributors and their managers to take advantage of the enormous performance potential of robust coaching approaches that equally leverage coaching skills, process, and AI-empowered technology to make coaching time as effective as possible.

3. Sales stacks will become more tightly integrated

Sales tools lose their effectiveness if they become cumbersome to use and difficult to manage. The trick to optimizing your sales stack is to ensure it is tightly integrated. In the coming year, more emphasis will be placed on building seamless sales stacks rather than just adding more technology to reps’ toolsets. Streamlining your sales stack with seamless integrations will ensure that sales teams can use their tools to improve effectiveness and efficiency rather than being a source of confusion and aggravation.

4. Analytics will enhance sales readiness

Analytics is used extensively to understand how our customers behave, in 2018 organizations will benefit from the data available in sales readiness tools to better understand their reps. This data isn’t just about how many sales calls reps are completing. It also considers their productivity, how effectively they sell and what information they use. This information will enable sales managers and leaders to take the sales readiness of their reps to a new level.

“The right measurement and tracking ensure that key stakeholders are aware of the readiness of their sales team over time and can track improvement,”

explains Nishant Mungali

, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer

for Mindtickle.

5. Millennial needs become the norm

Millennials are now the

largest generation in the US

and this will only continue to grow. So while businesses have focused on the need to address millennial preferences because they were different from Generation X or Baby Boomers, the reality is we must now accept that the preferences of millennials are those of the majority.

This will have a significant impact on sales readiness in the coming year because things that were once considered important to millennials will now become the norm. Bite-sized content, mobile capability, sharing wisdom over classroom teaching, value-driven learning, agility, flexibility to learn on the go and gamification will no longer be optional for sales readiness in 2018. They will all be mandatory to meet the changing needs of the workforce.

6. The cadence is set for continuous learning

With industry dynamics changing weekly and new products features rolling out regularly, it’s no longer sufficient to set and forget training. To maintain your reps’ level of sales readiness they need to be trained regularly. In the coming year, more businesses will shift from periodic training to continuous training enabled by mobile sales readiness tools that facilitate real-time updates to be pushed out to reps anywhere. Learning modules will become smaller and more frequent, making training a regular part of a salesperson’s job.

7. Peer-to-peer learning will take off

Traditionally, external experts have come in to train reps on new techniques and selling models, but this will change in 2018. While external training will still be relevant, internal expertize will become more prevalent, particularly as sales readiness technology enables winning sales techniques to be shared more readily amongst the sales organization.

This could be facilitated through best practice video role plays, success stories that are easily searchable or social tools that facilitate the sharing of knowledge easily. Sales enablement and sales leaders will still continue to play an important role in this process. Together they will ensure that content that is shared is truly the best practice so that peer-to-peer learning becomes the optimal form of learning.

6 Signs Your Sales Managers are Under-Trained

sales-managers-are-under-trained_500x500Research by the Sales Management Association has found that

41% of companies have no budget

to train their sales managers, and half of those that do have a training budget don’t offer any specific training to help them manage or lead a sales team. Yet sales managers are charged with the challenging task of motivating and leading their team to bring home the bacon.

The role of a sales manager is quite broad, so you can’t just look at their team’s quota to determine if they’re doing a good job. Here are six signs that may indicate that your sales managers are in dire need of some specific training.
1. They manage instead of leading

Many sales manager are promoted through the ranks, and while they may have been impressive salespeople, that doesn’t mean they know how to lead a team. Just like sales skills, leadership skills need to be learned either through experience or with specific training. Without these skills, many sales managers may naturally revert back to where they feel most comfortable.

This can manifest itself in several ways. Some may prefer to take over a deal and do the selling themselves. Others might spend all their time on their A players or C players, and leave the majority of their team floundering with no direction.
2. They see everything (or nothing) as a priority

You can’t do everything, that’s a simple fact of life, but it is something that a manager has to learn. Sales managers need to be able to differentiate between the tasks that are urgent and important and those that are not and prioritize them appropriately. The importance they place on particular tasks will be reflected in their team, which will rapidly magnify them. As leaders, sales managers must set the priorities for their team so they know where to spend their time.

Coaching is a classic example of something that is often overlooked even though it should be a priority on a sales managers to-do list. If a sales manager doesn’t know how to coach effectively they may de-prioritize it in favor of something they’re more comfortable with. So if some important things aren’t being prioritized, perhaps look into whether your sales manager has the skills to lead or coach their team effectively.
3. They can’t see beyond the horizon

It’s easy to get distracted fighting fires each day, but sales managers need to find the time to look beyond their immediate priorities and plan for the future. Developing a long-term strategy can be daunting even for experienced managers. It takes time, planning and discipline to develop a strategy that is clear, consistent and can be monitored. Without this, managers may find themselves directing their team aimlessly or, worse still, going around in circles. When you’re leading a team, this kind of ambling is inevitably reflected in how the team behaves – they have no purpose or direction.

If your sales manager can’t articulate exactly what they want their team to focus on in the next three, six or 12 months then they may need some help putting together a strategy that provides their team with clear direction and guides them on how to achieve it.
4. They don’t know how to identify performance issues in their team

Numbers, quotas and KPIs only tell part of the story when it comes to why someone is performing under par. Sales managers need to draw on a range of information and experience to really understand where their team’s skill gaps may be. Once an issue is diagnosed, the sales manager then needs to determine the best way to address the issue.

This can be quite challenging, particularly when some issues aren’t readily solved by training initiatives. For example, if a rep lacks motivation there may be many soft issues that need to be addressed to get their performance back on track – perhaps a good rep feels like they’re being underutilized. An experienced sales manager might bring them into the fold to help motivate other reps, but a less-experienced sales manager may not be able to identify and resolve these performance issues or tackle them in a way that is less than effective.
5. They let the loudest team members dictate the direction

The squeakiest wheel may get the oil but it isn’t always the one that needs the most attention and it’s the same when it comes to sales teams. Just because one person is complaining the loudest, it doesn’t necessarily mean that their issue is the direst or in need of attention. This is an issue that inexperienced sales managers may face the most, particularly if they’re lacking confidence. This can result in potential inequities in their team, misdirection of their energy or even alienate some team members.

Sales managers need to develop their softer skills so that they can manage different personalities effectively. These skills take a long time to develop unless specific training is provided.
6. They lack consistency

It’s not unusual for sales managers to develop their own processes and approach, but this lack of consistency, particularly in larger organizations can quickly become problematic. Sales managers need to be open to learning new things so they can all speak the same language, leverage the same information and embed consistency amongst their teams. This ensures that customer interactions are consistent, the messaging they hear is the same and also ensures that each sales team is on a level playing field.

From an organizational perspective, consistency enables sales teams to be compared accurately and reduces the possibility of confusion. But without sufficient training and guidance, it is almost impossible to achieve consistency across the entire sales organization. The best way to achieve this is for one area to have responsibility for ensuring processes, training, and the information is rolled out and monitored across the entire organization.

The Next Big Opportunity for Sales Enablement: Sales Engineers

If you’re looking for a quick win in your sales enablement programs then look no further than your sales engineering team. One of the most overlooked roles in sales enablement is that of the sales engineer, also known as technical sales, pre-sales or sales consultant. While 94.3% of businesses focus their sales enablement initiatives on frontline salespeople and account managers, only 45.9% shine light on their sales engineers, yet they play a crucial role in the sales process.

Sales-Engineer-enablementSales engineers often require more enablement than reps by virtue of the highly technical nature of their role. They not only need to know everything about their product, competitors, verticals, and industry, but sales engineers must also understand how to apply this information to different use cases and differentiate your product from that of your competitors. Sales engineers touch almost every part of the sales process and play a significant role in proving the success of your product to potential customers.
Sales engineer enablement

The sales engineer is the resident product expert in a sales call – a situation that can be highly stressful even for the most competent professional. They bring together the knowledge of how existing customers use your product, usually learned from the customer success team, with the sales teams understanding of the customer, their pain points, and needs. Essentially, sales engineers need to have the knowledge that both sales and customer success teams have, along with the detailed specifications of your product. As a consultant, they provide the deep knowledge that helps customers see why they should choose your product and be able to demonstrate it.

Their role covers not only initial sales conversations but also customized demonstrations and proof of concepts. It’s the sales engineer who sets up sandboxes and pilots so that customers can trial your product and see their specific use cases in action. This process of proof of concept can take a sales engineer anywhere from one week to six months to complete.

Some businesses have acknowledged the key role that sales engineers play. Symantec designed and implemented a comprehensive enablement program targeted specifically to the sales engineers and they believe well-enabled sales engineers make their pipeline bulletproof.  This is the exception rather than the rule and speaks to the value Symantec have placed on the role of the sales engineer in their focus on customer success. Many companies simply arm sales engineers with the same information that they give their sales reps or customer success teams. While this is a start, it rarely provides them with all the information they need, nor the depth of knowledge required, to complete their role effectively.

Some areas that sales engineers need to be enabled include:

  • Detailed product knowledge that incorporates technical specifications
  • Customer use cases
  • The product roadmap and future releases
  • The RFP process and what security documents are required for different verticals and industries
  • Up to date information on competitor products and industry updates
  • The ability to dive deeper into specific pain points and requirements
  • How to conduct a technical demonstration and manage trials and proof of concepts
  • Each aspect of the sales process including who is involved and understanding when they are required

Given how critical sales engineers are in turning an opportunity into a customer, it’s surprising that more businesses have not focused on enabling their knowledge and needs. Businesses that do this now can achieve a competitive advantage that is almost guaranteed to help them close more deals faster.

How have you enabled your sales engineers?

In Conversation with Mark Tefakis of Fuze

MARK-TEFAKIS_sales enablement_fuzeThis post is based on a webinar where Mark Tefakis, VP of Global Enablement at Fuze, shares the key pillars of successful sales enablement and how to show its ROI to your leadership.
Fuze is an award-winning “cloud-based unified communication platform that addresses complexities around the modern workforce with the ability to work in a way that drives efficiency and effectiveness for the growth and profitability metrics companies need,” explains Mark. “Founded in 2006, we’re headquartered in Boston and have offices throughout Europe, into Australia, Latin America, and Asia Pacific.”

The evolution and need for sales enablement

“Sales Enablement centered around training and development initially and expanded into how you fully enable the sales organization,” Mark continued. “A lot of CSOs are being challenged with having a constant pulse on the business, to be able to report on where they are today, where they’re going tomorrow, and knowing the lead and lag indicators so they can be responsive to the demands of the business. The discipline of sales enablement is a foundational set of processes and standards that help the CSO address that pressure and scrutiny. This foundation includes time to ramp (TTR) [onboarding], ongoing enablement [to increase productivity], and [preventing] unplanned churn.”

The five pillars of sales enablement

Mark developed the concept of the five pillars of sales enablement through his experience in sales and sales leadership. They are:

  1. Organizational alignment: “Before you get started you have to understand the dynamics around the organizational alignment. Do you have governance and some process in place where everybody understands the vision, strategies, initiatives, scorecards, and metrics that you’re putting in place to drive the success of the program? That’s critically important,” explained Mark.
  2. Role-based certification: Most sales organizations have several different roles that vary by company and industry. Role-based certification involves identifying the competency model tied to the skills and knowledge associated with each role. As you look through the motion of each role, what is the thing reps need to know, say, show, and do as they manage the day-in-a-life of performing against the expectations of the role? Next, turn it into a curriculum and how you want to train, develop, and evaluate the performance of these roles. There are three levels that comprise this certification model:
    1. Lecture and test the retention of knowledge;
    2. Exercise and application, transitioning from understanding a concept into applying and exercising the skill tied to that concept prior to going out into the field; and
    3. Managers evaluateperformance in the field and coach.
  3. Enablement on demand: “Leverage technology to streamline how effectively you execute against the things that are defined in the role-based competency model. There’s no need for heavy dependency on instructor-led training or virtual training when there are technology and applications that allow you to better drive efficiency and effectiveness, plus scale better for the organization within a proper cost model,” explains Mark. “Leverage technology as part of this foundational layer and put the power in the palm of the hand of the individual. Do this within cloud-based applications, with integration into CRM, where you can tie learning and sales supporting assets to a specific sales scenario, prescribing assets and learning based on that scenario. Also building in some gamification to drive contest around how people learn is really compelling. I would encourage you to think about enablement on demand,” he continues.
  4. Predictive analytics: “It’s one thing to look at reports and reference a dashboard of things that happened in the past. It’s another to look through the windshield, at the road ahead, and predictively be able to tell where your business is going. If you establish the right lead and lag metrics, supporting technology can show when individuals in your sales organization are heading for disaster. You can then start to prescribe specific learning to get them over that hurdle so they can start to perform much better,” suggests Mark.
  5. Sales advisory boards (a.k.a. voice of the customer): “If you don’t establish champions and have a feedback loop from the sales organization, you will battle some apprehensive people while you’re pushing programs out. This is a mechanism for you to be able to gather insight and feedback in a structured fashion. Sales can contribute to the design and development of your initiatives through localized champions who can support and help drive adoption,” he explains.

“With the five pillars of successful sales enablement,” Mark explained, “we’re leveraging really interesting technology to help do this so you can scale with the demands of the business. You’re not asking the CFO for a ton of bodies, you’re actually leveraging the power of technology, and better equipping and enabling the field based on the power in the palm of your hand, which ties back to the center pillar of enabling on demand.”

How sales enablement works at Fuze

“First and foremost is sales methodology. Whether you do it internally or you leverage an external partner, you have to start there because that is the foundation that drives the rest of the bubbles to the right,” Mark continued.
“Once you have that in place, you then start to think in terms of how to establish a best practice approach to outreach and engagement to the marketplace. We use Mindtickle for our learning management system and recently launched it to our global sales organization. We use Savo for our content management system and a combination of both Mindtickle and Savo to help us with ‘voice of the customer’ and engagement with the field.  This gives us the pulse of what’s going on,” explains Mark.
“All of these equate to very effective sales productivity based on the pillars and the underlying enablement technology that you can put in place.”